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Banned
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matthew330, I want to reserve this spot, below your post, because then I can avoid taking up space by quoting you.....stay tuned.....okay...I'm back....
My wife's son is a member of an elite U.S. military unit. he is looking forward to his first foreign deployment, after more than 30 months of training. He is positive that the liberal media and the opinions of folks like me have hurt recruiting efforts, and that Iraq is largely pacified, except in Anbar, Baghdad, Tikrit, and in Basra. He has no explanation for poor electrical and oil production in iraq.
He knows that the U.S. found WMD, and that, despite admitting that the U.S. has excellent "eye in the sky" surveillance, Saddam was able to smuggle all of his
WMD stockpiles and their R&D and manufacturing infrastructure to Iran and Syria before the 2003 U.S. invasion. He is frustrated and mystified by the failure of the Bush admin. to "defend itself" by publicizing the "proof" of all of this!
He has one of the highest IQs of anyone I've ever met....but he believes what he believes.
I look at what all three principle U.S. Iraqi weapons inspectors have said, and at the miserable job that the Bush admin. did to justify the reasons for invading and occupying Iraq....and what it has cost....in blood, and treasure:
Quote:
http://www.defenselink.mil/transcrip...ecdef0223.html
Presenter: Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz Friday, May 9, 2003
Deputy Secretary Wolfowitz Interview with Sam Tannenhaus, Vanity Fair
......Wolfowitz: No, I think it happens to be correct. The truth is that for reasons that have a lot to do with the U.S. government bureaucracy we settled on the one issue that everyone could agree on which was weapons of mass destruction as the core reason, but -- hold on one second --
(Pause)
Kellems: Sam there may be some value in clarity on the point that it may take years to get post-Saddam Iraq right. It can be easily misconstrued, especially when it comes to --
Wolfowitz: -- there have always been three fundamental concerns. One is weapons of mass destruction, the second is support for terrorism, the third is the criminal treatment of the Iraqi people. Actually I guess you could say there's a fourth overriding one which is the connection between the first two. Sorry, hold on again......
.....Wolfowitz: To wrap it up.
The third one by itself, as I think I said earlier, is a reason to help the Iraqis but it's not a reason to put American kids' lives at risk, certainly not on the scale we did it. That second issue about links to terrorism is the one about which there's the most disagreement within the bureaucracy, even though I think everyone agrees that we killed 100 or so of an al Qaeda group in northern Iraq in this recent go-around, that we've arrested that al Qaeda guy in Baghdad who was connected to this guy Zarqawi whom Powell spoke about in his UN presentation........
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Quote:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...061100723.html
Memo: U.S. Lacked Full Postwar Iraq Plan
Advisers to Blair Predicted Instability
By Walter Pincus
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, June 12, 2005; Page A01
......Testimony by then-Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul D. Wolfowitz, one of the chief architects of Iraq policy, before a House subcommittee on Feb. 28, 2003, just weeks before the invasion, illustrated the optimistic view the administration had of postwar Iraq. He said containment of Hussein the previous 12 years had cost "slightly over $30 billion," adding, "I can't imagine anyone here wanting to spend another $30 billion to be there for another 12 years." As of May, the Congressional Research Service estimated that Congress has approved $208 billion for the war
in Iraq since 2003........
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Quote:
http://www.zogby.com/news/ReadNews.dbm?ID=1075
Released: February 28, 2006
U.S. Troops in Iraq: 72% Say End War in 2006
.......The wide-ranging poll also shows that 58% of those serving in country say the U.S. mission in Iraq is clear in their minds, while 42% said it is either somewhat or very unclear to them, that they have no understanding of it at all, or are unsure. While 85% said the U.S. mission is mainly “to retaliate for Saddam’s role in the 9-11 attacks,” 77% said they also believe the main or a major reason for the war was “to stop Saddam from protecting al
Qaeda in Iraq.”
“Ninety-three percent said that removing weapons of mass destruction is not a reason for U.S. troops being there,”
said Pollster John Zogby, President and CEO of Zogby International. “Instead, that initial rationale went by the wayside and, in the minds of 68% of the troops, the real mission became to remove Saddam Hussein.” Just 24% said that “establishing a democracy that can be a model for the Arab World" was the main or a major reason for the war.
Only small percentages see the mission there as securing oil supplies (11%) or to provide long-term bases for US troops in the region (6%)........
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<a href="http://www.tfproject.org/tfp/showthread.php?t=84506">Are the Feb. 18 Harris Iraq Poll Results "The triumph of Opinion Over News"?</a>
Quote:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/s...toryId=5504298
Iraq
Expert: Iraq WMD Find Did Not Point to Ongoing Program
Listen to this story...
Talk of the Nation, June 22, 2006 · Two Republican lawmakers say a declassified report points to hundreds of weapons of mass destruction that were found in Iraq. Peter Hoekstra, who chairs the House Intelligence Committee, and Sen. Rick Santorum (R-PA) on Wednesday released a declassified summary of a report by the National Ground Intelligence Center. A former weapons inspector says most of the degraded weapons are 20 years old and did not point to an ongoing chemical weapons program.
Guest:
Charles Deulfer, Former chief U.S. weapons inspector in Iraq; former deputy chairman of the United Nations Weapons
Inspection Team in Iraq:
NEAL CONAN (host): The report says hundreds of WMDs were found in Iraq. Does this change any of the findings in your report?
DEULFER: No, the report -- the findings of the report were basically to describe the relationship of the regime with weapons of mass destruction generally. You know, at two different times, Saddam elected to have and then not to have weapons of mass destruction. We found, when we were investigating, some residual chemical munitions. And we said in the report that such chemical munitions would probably still be found. But the ones which have been found are left over from the Iran-Iraq war. They are almost 20 years old, and they are in a decayed fashion. It is very interesting that there are so many that were unaccounted for, but they do not constitute a weapon of mass destruction, although they could be a local hazard.
CONAN: Mm-hmm. So these -- were these the weapons of mass destruction that the Bush administration said that it was going into Iraq to find before the war?
DEULFER: No, these do not indicate an ongoing weapons of mass destruction program as had been thought to exist before the war. These are leftover rounds, which Iraq probably did not even know that it had. Certainly, the leadership was unaware of their existence, because they made very clear that they had gotten rid of their programs as a prelude to getting out of sanctions.
[...]
DEULFER: Sarin agent decays, you know, at a certain rate, as does mustard agent. What we found, both as U.N. and later when I was with the Iraq Survey Group, is that some of these rounds would have highly degraded agent, but it is still dangerous. You know, it can be a local hazard. If an insurgent got it and wanted to create a local hazard, it could be exploded. When I was running the ISG -- the Iraq Survey Group -- we had a couple of them that had been turned in to these IEDs, the improvised explosive devices. But they are local hazards. They are not a major, you know, weapon of mass destruction.
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Quote:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...062201475.html
New Intel Report Reignites Iraq Arms Fight
By KATHERINE SHRADER
The Associated Press
Thursday, June 22, 2006; 11:11 PM
...."We now have found stockpiles," Santorum asserted.
But intelligence officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the subject's sensitive nature, said the weapons were produced before the 1991 Gulf War and there is no evidence to date of chemical munitions manufactured since then. They said an assessment of the weapons concluded they are so degraded that they couldn't now be used as designed.
They probably would have been intended for chemical attacks during the Iran-Iraq War, said David Kay, who headed the U.S. weapons-hunting team in Iraq from 2003 until early 2004.
He said experts on Iraq's chemical weapons are in "almost 100 percent agreement" that sarin nerve agent produced from the 1980s would no longer be dangerous.
"It is less toxic than most things that Americans have under their kitchen sink at this point," Kay said.And any of Iraq's 1980s-era mustard would produce burns, but it is unlikely to be lethal, Kay said.....
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Quote:
http://www.time.com/time/nation/arti...351165,00.html
Exclusive: Scott Ritter in His Own Words
The former weapons inspector explains his switch from getting up Saddam's nose to picking fights with Bush
....In 1998, you said Saddam had "not nearly disarmed." Now you say he doesn't have weapons of mass destruction
(WMD). Why did you change your mind?
I have never given Iraq a clean bill of health! Never! Never! I've said that no one has backed up any allegations that Iraq has reconstituted WMD capability with anything that remotely resembles substantive fact. To say that Saddam's doing it is in total disregard to the fact that if he gets caught he's a dead man and he knows it.
Deterrence has been adequate in the absence of inspectors but this is not a situation that can succeed in the long term. In the long term you have to get inspectors back in.
Iraq's borders are porous. Why couldn't Saddam have obtained the capacity to produce WMD since 1998 when the weapons inspectors left?
I am more aware than any UN official that Iraq has set up covert procurement funds to violate sanctions. This was true in 1997-1998, and I'm sure its true today. Of course Iraq can do this. The question is, has someone found that what Iraq has done goes beyond simple sanctions violations? We have tremendous capabilities to detect any effort by Iraq to obtain prohibited capability. The fact that no one has shown that he has acquired that capability doesn't necessarily translate into incompetence on the part of the intelligence community. It may mean that he hasn't done anything.....
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Last edited by host; 06-25-2006 at 12:46 PM..
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